Then a voice calls, “Mom?”
Heart still pounding from the unexpected kiss and what she thought was another haunting, Meg hurries to the top of the stairs with Sam on her heels.
She peers over the banister to see Cosette and Geoffrey, bags in their hands, looking up at her.
“Do you know how hard it is to find an onion ring in this burg?” Geoffrey demands. “Enough hummus, organic produce, sushi, pinot grigio, and espresso to supply a nation of soccer moms for a hundred years, but if you want—”
He breaks off, looking over Meg’s shoulder, where Sam has presumably become visible.
“Hello,” Geoffrey tells him politely, and casts a bit of a smug grin at Meg. She knows he’s thinking about her New Year’s resolution—and that he suspects she just violated it.
To Sam, Geoffrey says, “And you must be…?” with obvious irony, as Geoffrey has no way of knowing who Sam must be.
Meg dares to dart a glance at Cosette and is surprised to see that she looks merely intrigued. And… impressed?
Looking over her shoulder, Meg can see why. Sam, with his shaggy hair and ruggedly handsome face, is…
Well, pretty much a total hottie, to borrow a favorite phrase of Cosette’s. Or is it Geoffrey’s?
No matter. It’s been a while since Meg has personally encountered a total hottie, but Sam Rooney definitely fits the bill.
Which is exactly why she should have run in the opposite direction.
Instead, you just kissed the living daylights out of him, she reminds herself, trying to fend off the sensation that what just happened between them was a dream sequence in some bizarre production.
“I’m Sam Rooney, an old friend of Meg’s.”
Startled back to reality by that unexpected—and basically untrue—introduction, she nods in vigorous agreement. “Sam was helping me move stuff.”
“Really,” Geoffrey says dubiously.
“Yes. All those boxes are so heavy that I couldn’t get them up the stairs, so Sam… helped.”
Never mind that there are no actual boxes on the second floor yet, which might lead Cosette and Geoffrey to wonder exactly what Meg and her hot old friend were doing in the bedroom.
“Sam,” Meg says, heading down the steps with him right behind her, lest the newcomers venture up, “this is my daughter Geoffrey and my friend Cosette.”
“Um, Mom? Hello?” Cosette waves a hand in her face as she arrives at the foot of the staircase, “I’m your daughter; he’s your friend.”
“Oh, right, whatever.” Meg is becoming more discombobulated by the second—much, she sees, to Geoffrey’s silent amusement. She prattles on, “Sam has a son your age, and he’s going to play soccer with you.”
“That’s funny, I thought Sam was about my age,” Geoffrey cracks.
“I was talking to Cosette.”
“That’s even funnier, because I told you I’m not playing soccer,” Cosette retorts.
“Yes, you are. She is,” Meg assures Sam, without looking at him.
She isn’t particularly anxious to gauge his reaction to her daughter, who more closely resembles Edward Scissorhands than the mythical all-American girl next door.
“It’s great to meet you, Cosette,” Sam says so easily, she’s relieved. “I think I’ll be your soccer coach.”
“That’s nice, but I’m not actually playing. My mother is deluded.”
“Cosette!”
“Mom!”
Fuming, Meg glares at her daughter. “You’re not allowed to speak to me that way, and you’re about to lose a privilege.”
“Too late. I’ve already lost them all, now that we live here. Guess you’ll have to figure out another punishment.”
“Believe me, I will,” Meg mutters.
“On that note,” Geoffrey says after an uncomfortable pause, “I think I’ll toddle back to civilization.”
“And I’ve got to get home,” Sam pipes up, following Geoffrey toward the door.
There, he pauses to ask, “Meg, do you want to spend the night? You and Cosette,” he adds hastily, and tacks on a gratuitous, “because you don’t have anyplace to sleep here.”
“No, we’ll be fine,” she says reluctantly.
His offer is tempting for reasons other than the lack of sleeping accommodations here, but she isn’t particularly anxious to further expose him to her sulky fifteen-year-old at this point.
He’ll get to know Cosette soon enough. Unfortunately.
“Well, holler if you need anything. See you at soccer,” he calls over his shoulder as he makes his exit.
“Definitely,” Meg shoots a daggered look at her daughter as she returns with false cheer, “See you at soccer.”
Chapter
6
Standing in the sunlit kitchen listening to morning birds chirping outside the screen and waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, Sam does his best to think of a good reason to go into the den.
Does he want to reread one of the dog-eared novels that line the built-in shelves?
Not particularly.
Does he need to pay a few of the bills stacking up in the basket on his desk?
Yes, but he can’t. Not until after school starts next week and he resumes getting regular paychecks.
You could… um… dust! he tells himself triumphantly.
Yes, every room in the house can use a thorough dusting; he can’t afford the Molly Maids service during the summer months. While he’s fairly good about staying on top of the laundry, dishes, and vacuuming—a daily must with Rover shedding all over the place—he never pays much attention to the furniture.
Sheryl was always big on that. She’d bustle from room to room with a wad of dust rags and a can of lemon-scented polish, spraying and swiping, making everything gleam and smell great.
Sheryl would want you to dust the den, he assures himself.
Yes, but not for the reason he’s so eager to dust the den on this particular morning.
It happens to be the only room in the house—aside from Ben’s room upstairs, where Ben just retreated after returning from his morning run—with windows that look directly over the old Duckworth place.
Rather, the new Addams place.
Yes, Sam is hoping to catch a glimpse of Meg again, somewhere other than in his own head. Last night was a restless one, and not just because he never sleeps well when one of the kids isn’t tucked safely under his roof.
But when he finally did doze off, he dreamed of Meg.
Of kissing her, and…
More.
He woke up predawn feeling like a teenaged boy again: incredibly turned on by an erotic dream and frustrated as hell to realize that it wasn’t real.
With a jingling of dog tags and toenails tapping on the hardwoods, Rover materializes in the kitchen.
“Good morning, boy.” Sam reaches over to pet his head. “Hungry?”
Rover nods.
Well, not really. But master and mutt have been a team long enough for Sam easily to interpret the dog’s needs.
He opens a can of Alpo, fills Rover’s bowl, and sets it on the floor. “There you go, pal. Knock yourself out.”
The dog fed, he remembers to turn his attention to filling a plastic cup to water the potted geranium on the windowsill. He bought the plant at the nursery on Mother’s Day, when he took the kids to buy flowers for the cemetery.
When Sheryl was alive, they did that at his mother-in-law’s grave every Mother’s Day. Devoted daughter, devoted gardener, Sheryl would kneel in the dirt beside the granite headstone, crying and digging with her trowel as Sam and the kids and her father stood by helplessly. When she was finished, the bare earth was transformed into a blooming landscape; purged of her grief, Sheryl would brush herself off and move on.
Sam knew he had to take over the yearly ritual on her behalf, and he does. On the second weekend of May every year, he and the kids and his father-in-law cry and dig and plant. It’s cathartic.
And every year, Sam buys an extr
a large geranium to brighten the kitchen window, the way Sheryl always did.
He’s no gardener, but he’s learning. He had to.
He still remembers the day they were packing to move here and Katie, sobbing hysterically, came to him carrying a clay pot filled with dusty clumps of dirt and a withered brown stalk.
It was the miniature rose she had proudly given to Sheryl for her birthday the month before she died. Then, it was covered in shiny foliage and delicate pink blooms. Sheryl tended to it daily.
Sam never even thought to water it after she died. It was all he could do to keep getting up in the morning with the kids, keep them fed and clothed, keep helping them with their homework and filling out the endless backpack paperwork, keep putting one foot in front of the other.
That was then.
These days, he has all that other stuff down pat. And he remembers to water the geranium on the windowsill a couple of times a week. No more, no less.
Ironically, the first year, he watered the geranium every day and watched the velvety leaves turn yellow, curl, and drop. Concerned, he watered it twice a day. It died anyway.
It turned out he had drowned them; the nice lady at the nursery—who fondly remembered Sheryl and always smiled sadly at the kids—told him geraniums don’t like to be soaked.
“Why don’t you try a different kind of plant for your windowsill?” she suggested. “We have some nice low-maintenance Melampodium over here…”
Low-maintenance.
She didn’t think he could do it.
He was determined to prove her—to prove everyone—wrong.
It had to be geraniums.
It hasn’t been easy to get it right: to water them just enough without flooding or forgetting.
This year, though, the big plant in the clay pot on the sill has made it through the summer with plenty of red blooms and curly deep green foliage.
He might just have the hang of it now. Sheryl would be pleased with the blooms in the kitchen and the garden on her grave.
Tossing the plastic cup into the sink, Sam yawns and checks the glass coffee carafe again: a mere two inches of fragrant brew in the bottom and a good couple of minutes before it’ll be full.
It only takes a couple of minutes to dust a small room. Sheryl used to say that, back when she was irritated with his ability to overlook layers of dust along with other household blights.
How many times did he wonder, in the wake of losing her, why they had wasted all that time bickering about unimportant issues?
Yes, all married couples do it.
All husbands take their wives for granted at some point or another; it’s human nature.
But now, knowing what he knows, Sam will never take anything for granted again.
There’s guilt, too.
Guilt because their marriage, as good as it was, didn’t entirely live up to his expectations.
He loved Sheryl. But in the year or two leading up to her death, he had begun to wonder if he was really in love with her.
They were best friends back in college; a friendship based on a number of elements. They were both secondary education majors; they lived in the same dorm; they were both athletic and had mutual friends, similar tastes in music, movies, books, sports.
Friendship eventually led to fooling around. That happened back in college. You had a few beers, you wound up kissing girls who were your friends and lived under your roof. Fooling around led to coupledom. That happened, too. It was convenient to have a girlfriend who was part of your group of friends, as opposed to some of his buddies, who were trying to maintain doomed long-distance relationships.
Coupledom eventually led, after graduation, to living together, to engagement, then marriage. That was the rhythm of life; it all made sense.
Sam did balk at getting engaged, when the time came to sink or swim.
But she gave him an ultimatum. She wanted to move on with their lives, or with her own.
It was either marry Sheryl or let her go.
Sam wasn’t willing to let her go. They were too close, too entrenched in each other’s lives. Everyone around them wanted—no, expected—them to get married. Their friends, their families, kept pointing out that there were so many reasons to stay together.
Meanwhile, Sam couldn’t think of a compelling reason to break up.
Other than the nagging feeling he had that it was all too pat.
That there was supposed to be more to relationships than falling together like neatly interlocking puzzle pieces.
More… passion. Not just physical passion—though for Sam, married intimacy had faded into a comfortable, if lackluster and predictable rhythm by the time Katie came along. No, Sam also wondered if there wasn’t supposed to be, between husband and wife, more of an emotionally charged connection fueled by fervent feelings.
But their marriage did work. Especially because the children were one more thing—the most important thing—they had in common. He and Sheryl were fiercely devoted parents, with Ben and Katie, they were a wholeheartedly cohesive family unit.
He just wonders what would have happened, had Sheryl lived, when Ben and Katie left the nest.
Would the vaguely restless, unsatisfied feeling have persisted, grown stronger?
Would he have forever wondered whether there was supposed to be… more?
Would he or Sheryl have had a midlife crisis at some point, and left the marriage to find out if there was more?
That would have been horrible: divorce. Not as horrible as widowhood, because at least his kids wouldn’t be motherless. But horrible nonetheless.
And why am I thinking this way this morning?
I need some kind of distraction to break this mood.
Sam’s gaze automatically goes to the digital clock on the microwave—8:06. Too early for Katie to be calling, ready to come home.
Sam’s brother Jack showed up with Ben just after he’d left Meg’s.
They were chatty about their golf outing at Chelsea Piers and dinner afterward at the famous Ben Benson’s Steakhouse—“Where else would I take a kid named Ben?” Jack asked jovially.
Sam did his best to carry on a reciprocal conversation, but he was still trying to absorb what happened between him and Meg in that upstairs bedroom—and everything else about the evening.
He still can’t figure out what caused the slamming sound he and Meg heard when they were on the stairs. And he has to admit, he did think he heard someone down in the hall the first time, just as Meg did—when there was nobody there. He still doesn’t believe in ghosts. But realizing that he, too, is susceptible to the myth really threw him for a loop.
So, for that matter, did kissing Meg.
As did meeting Meg’s daughter, who wasn’t at all what he expected.
All right, he admittedly didn’t give that much consideration before he encountered Cosette. But as a teacher and a parent, he knows enough girls her age to have a perpetual stereotype in mind.
Meg’s daughter shattered it.
Teenaged girls her age—most girls Sam knows, anyway—are insecure and spend a lot of time acting like they aren’t. They’re wrapped up in how they look and do their best to make the most of their God-given physical attributes. Their conversations are liberally sprinkled with like and their remarks frequently sound like they’re ending in a question even when they’re not asking one.
Cosette, however, exuded a centered confidence and articulation. And although anyone can see that there’s a pretty girl lurking somewhere beneath the unnatural hair and makeup and baggy black wardrobe, she is obviously bent on keeping it well concealed.
As far as Sam can tell, the only cliché Meg’s daughter personifies at this point is her antagonistic attitude toward her mother.
Unfortunately, the moment he laid eyes on her, he knew Ben—whose budding interest in girls is apparently limited to surface appearance at this point—would probably want nothing to do with her. The girls Sam has caught his son checking out are your garden-vari
ety high school cheerleader/prom queen types.
The same kinds of girls Sam used to date.
He wishes he could retract his offer to have his son kick a soccer ball around with Meg’s daughter.
Not that Cosette is likely to have any interest in that, anyway.
But her mother seems hell-bent on having her play on the team.
And, lucky me, I get to be her coach.
Naturally, Sam checked his list of players first chance he got last night. At first he thought she wasn’t on it.
The list goes alphabetically by last name, and there is no Addams, Cosette at the top.
There is, however, a Hudson, Cosette a third of the way down, and the address is 33 Boxwood Lane.
That’s her.
Sam also, embarrassingly, got online as soon as Ben went to bed, and Googled Meg Addams. He figured that if she’d been on Broadway, there would be a wealth of information about her.
There was nothing.
Remembering the soccer team list, he then checked Meg Hudson, figuring she might have used her ex-husband’s name on stage.
Still nothing.
Which means nothing, really…
Other than that Sam is feeling more and more like an infatuated teenaged boy.
Now, reaching into the cupboard below the sink to find a can of Pledge and a dust rag, he abruptly stops himself.
What are you doing?
Act your age.
You’re a grown man.
And you absolutely cannot let things go any further with Meg than they did last night.
If only he could remember, in the bright, promising light of day, exactly why that can’t happen.
Driving—as opposed to, say, kissing—doesn’t come right back to you when you haven’t done it in a while.
Late last night, Meg was nervous behind the wheel of her new used Hyundai on rain-slicked roads after leaving the truck rental place in White Plains. Cosette glowering in the front seat didn’t help matters much.
Now, as she steers the car through the streets of her old hometown, the sun is shining, and the roads are dry, but Cosette is still glowering in the front seat with her, and Meg’s driving skills are still rusty.
Not only that, but things around here are unnervingly unfamiliar.